Molly's Game (2017)

After suffering a horrific accident at a national skiing contest, Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) gives up her Olympic dreams and moves to LA. While working as a cocktail waitress she meets arrogant real estate agent Dean (Jeremy Strong), and agrees to become his assistant.

Her duties include setting up his lucrative weekly poker game, which hosts some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Soon she has cut Dean loose, and is hosting huge stake matches in Los Angeles and New York. As her own personal fortune increases so does the attentions of the IRS and the criminal underworld towards her and her game.

Director and co-writer Aaron Sorkin starts the film well, with a well executed and wince- inducing freestyle skiing sequence. From here we are in LA, and the poker sequences are fluid and engrossing in a Goodfellas style that is indebted to Scorsese without being derivative in a manner of American Hustle. There is plenty of fluid camera movement and excellent visualizations of poker hands, and Sorkin is able to use simple things like shot- reverse shot in a creative manner. Sorkin has added some electricity to this most unfilmable of sports, showing Rounders how it should be done.

Jessica Chastain looks phenomenal throughout, and credit should be given to a costume department that varies a wide range of stunning outfits. It's clear she dominates the room and hypnotizes these powerful men, whose extravagance and indifference to extreme wealth is intoxicating to watch (a highlight is when one player tries to leave a Monet painting as collateral).

Bill Camp puts in a great performance as Harlan Eustice, a seemingly competent poker player who starts to feel the heat. Stealing the pot is Player X as played by Michael Cera. Here he is using his youthful demeanour as a mask for a wicked personality, his most malevolent role since Francois of Youth In Revolt.

This is a first directorial effort of prolific screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and it is with a certain irony that one of the weakest elements to Molly's Game is the script. There is an undue focus on voice-over and an only fleetingly involving legal case in which Molly is wrapped up in years after her stint as a hostess has ended.

The real high stakes finale happens as Molly's empire starts to crumble. That an audience is left with a resolution filled with hokey courtroom drama and cloying family moments between her and her father (Kevin Costner) afterwards dulls the film. Sorkin seems to have made the same mistake as Molly Bloom; thinking that being in an interesting environment makes you an interesting person outside of it.

Another key difference between Sorkin here and Scorsese's best work is the score. It is ordinary throughout, except in the legal cases when it is also bogged down by dull, obvious cues. While Molly's account of a poker world few of us have seen before captivate regardless, the music is another dud element in repetitive legal scenes.

What was amusing is that Molly's lawyers are played by Michael Kostroff who starred in The Wire as lawyer Maurice Levy, and Idris Elba who was criminal/wannabe businessman Stringer Bell in the same series. This footnote aside, I found nothing of particular interest in this chunk of the plot, which leaves the whole work dangerously close to a flop.

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Fmovies: Molly's Game feels like a movie without the center of gravity. It tries to carry itself on overanalysed, emotionally insignificant environmental details. Methodologically explained poker games are captivating the first few times, but get incredibly dull and underwhelming in the second half of the movie, feeling like redundant content. The protagonist is unable to pull the overexplained and "all over the place" narrative into one harmonious puzzle. When at the end Molly and her father discuss the memories of the past, the movie attempts to have a significant emotional culmination but ends with nothing more but a shallow and uninspired moral of the story - check the path before you follow it.

I would give this movie two stars, but there are some solid performances (especially from Idris Elba). Therefore my score is 4.

Saw the movie last night, one of the best movies (if not THE BEST) I seen for some time now. All the characters are razor sharp, the entire dialog pierces your brain like an ice pick, great humor, great sarcasm, snappy lines, you feel like you need more and more during the movie (gets you addicted like a bad habit). One of the best discussions in cinema history (the therapy scene). Go see it in cinema, the crowd effect amplifies the emotions. My mark for this is 8/10 , 10/10 been an absolute masterpiece made every hundred years or so :))

Molly's Game fmovies. Nothing comes close to the rush of winning, at least according to those who have succeeded where others have failed. Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) managed to become a millionaire with a dose of luck, will and endless street smarts. The former professional skier ran high stakes poker-games in Los Angeles and New York and found herself in the middle of a federal investigation, where she was accused of colluding with organized crime.

Being a sucker for great stories of real life characters, it is easy to see what Aaron Sorkin saw in the very true tale of Molly Bloom. The American ethos of being No. 1 combined with the isolation and principles of its heroine make "Molly's Game" a tremendous playing field for Sorkin's directorial debut.

Even though he has dealt with themes of power, loyalty and the darker side of entrepreneurial endeavors in "The Social Network", "Newsroom", "Steve Jobs" and "Moneyball", what sets this story apart is that Sorkin chooses to layer the rise-and-fall of the titular character with questions about business morals and the loss of a more principled economic system, that has been washed away by fast-buck artists and fatalistic devil-may-care attitudes.

"Molly's Game" has a speedy pace, marvelous performances by both Chastain and Idris Elba, as her lawyer, and is directed with a sure hand. Which makes Sorkin's first directorial outing a joy to watch.

It's two-hour-plus running time glides by like a breeze and ends on a corny yet truthful note about the virtues of failure, that is a glimmer of hope in times of struggle, as well as one of the tenets of screen writing.

The fight, the hustle and the failure never end, but then again, so do the rewards in their own funny way. You win some, you lose some, and Sorkin never seems to forget how close he is to the edge.

I was absolutely mesmerized by this tale of Molly, a woman who was obsessed at being the best at anything she did whether that was Olympic skiing or controlling the seedy underworld of high stakes Poker.

Jessica Chastain is incredible as Molly Chastain. She makes the character feel real, holds the camera's attention, and helps us to understand the underlying motivations behind Molly's actions.

I particularly liked the chemistry between Idris Elba (who plays Molly's lawyer Jaffey). Their scenes are some of the most electric in the way they play off each other's emotions and spar with the great dialogue barbs Aaron Sorkin wrote so wonderfully.

Speaking of Aaron Sorkin, for a first time director, he absolutely knocks this out of the park. He conferred with his friend & director David Fincher on strategies for shooting this film along the way and he go great advice because the innovative camera angles, control of time (a key sign that a director knows what they are doing), and assured pacing make this one of the most enrapturing and compelling dramas of 2017.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely LOVE Aaron Sorkin. I really enjoy the movies he's written and his television shows are among my all time favorites. In fact, I have even said on more than one occasion that I believe that his name will go down in the history of great American writers along with people like Mark Twain.

I am also a big fan of Jessica Chastain, of poker and of writer/directors. So, as you can imagine, I was very excited for this movie, especially when I heard that Mr. Sorkin would be making his directorial debut.

Unfortunately, it seems that not all directors can/should write and that, at least this writer, can't direct. I know that it is his first time in the chair, but he has been in the business for over 25 years and has had the opportunity and privilege to work with some true masters of the craft. Yet he managed to fall into what is possibly the biggest trap for someone in his position by ignoring one of the basic rules of the medium: "Show, don't tell.".

This movie had more voice over narration that I've EVER heard in another film before. Don't get me wrong, when done properly I think this device can be extremely useful for both efficiently moving the story forward and effectively creating emotional investment and impact. This was not the case in Molly's Game.

Aaron's words didn't have any of their normal spark or edge. There was no music to the language. The voice over and the dialogue were both incredibly flat and unengaging. The words themselves weren't even that interesting, there were just so many of them and with every additional one it made the last that much less significant. I haven't read the book that this screenplay was adapted from, but at times I wondered if entire sections of the narration weren't just being read verbatim from it.

I really think I could have closed my eyes and just listened to this "movie" and got about 80-90% of the experience. Honestly, the only visual element Sorkin seemed willing or capable of paying any attention too were the lead actresses admittedly lovely curves that were so frequently highlighted in the vast array of expensive dresses she wore throughout the film. I'm certainly not opposed to a little female based visual stimulation, but it isn't really the type of "smart" content I've come to expect and adore from one of my favorite creators.

It seems that I am in the minority with these opinions and I hope that those of you who would disagree with me were able to take something meaningful from this film because I was just left wondering why I just spent nearly two and a half hours of my time enduring a film that barely grabbed by attention once.

Here's hoping that this was a minor glitch in an otherwise stellar career and not a sign of things to come.